Making Designer Babies Is Surely Not Progress

What are babies? Bookends? Knickknacks? Gewgaws to be picked off the shelf down at the Infants R Us store?

Of course not.

Children are children. Small humans. Separate and special.

Children are not Beenie Babies to be collected or rejected in their rich diversity. They are not wines, subject to choice as to how their hue might complement another consideration, meat or fish, brother or sister, mixes and matches. They are not something faddish, seasonal or negotiable to suit their parents' fancy of the instant.

They are children. Period.

One might think, though, that they are baubles and accessories, like earrings, as science is pushed to unnatural ends to manipulate reality to produce a child of the ``desired'' sex. In a technological advance ultimately only slightly different -- although surely less brutal -- than practices in some cultures of destroying children of an unwanted sex, scientists are producing designer babies, correcting dumb nature to satisfy a parent's whim to have a child -- or not have a child -- of a particular sex.

The journal Human Reproduction reports scientists have found a technique to separate sperm cells that carry the male chromosome from those that carry the female-producing chromosome. Already, dozens of pregnancies have been manipulated to favor the approved sex. Just for the fun of it.

While there are specific diseases that travel with a specific sex -- hemophilia, for example -- that could be taken into account, the major interest so far has been in sex selection for reasons of personal preference, vanity or variety. Heaven help us.

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to know enough to gauge the morality and ethics of such decisions and practices, but I think I know enough to know an outrage when I see one. Parents influencing the sex of their children the way they'd choose a tie or pin to go with a particular wardrobe.

Can a child be owned?

Do I own my sons the way I own my automobile or my shoes? I can repaint my car or change the lacings in my footwear without a thought. But do I have the right to tinker with another human being -- or the process through which that human being came into being? Because I have had enough sons and would like a girl instead? Or because I do not want a girl at all?

They must pay the price -- benign or life- altering -- of my wishes. A child becomes something not because it is meant to be or ought to be but because that is the way I want it to be. Can that be right? Ever?

A society that will punish me with ferocity for stealing someone's stereo or silverware seems ready to ignore the eugenics of altering an innocent's vital gender or sex. It's not a child at that point? What is it, what will it be, if it is not a child? In-the-works, but a child none the less. What is it otherwise, a rutabaga?

Certainly it would seem that by aggressively taking responsibility for the sex of a child, one assumes responsibility for that child as a child from that point on. Anything short of that responsibility would be a demonic experimenting with lifeforms acceptable in no civilized culture.

Yet people are fooling around with the essential nature -- the most essential nature -- of another.

For what?

To balance off the pink and the blue pajamas? To satisfy some self- superimposed sensation that having this sort of child is preferable to having that sort of child because it amuses the parent to believe so.

How arrogant. How pathetic.

To whom will this technology be available? The wealthy. The powerful. Maybe the wise. But who might have access in other societies -- India or China, say, where to have girl children is too often seen as creating an unacceptable burden, too often with horrible consequences.

If we would recoil in revulsion at the idea of changing the sex of a human being after conception or birth, how could we be comfortable at all with doing so even before?

Increasingly we have the power to do extraordinary things. Blessed with new science, advancing technologies and expanded imagination, society has the power to seemingly change the direction of the stars themselves. But it does not always have the authority to do so. There are things we are wiser to leave alone, to let them follow their natural course.